91ÌÒÉ«

You may already know that Ross is still a family owned business, but did you know that Ross is also an employee owned business?  

We have something called an ESOP, an “Employee Stock Ownership Program”. The goal of the program is to give every employee a chance to benefit from the success of the company – and for employees to care and act like owners. I can tell you, this has been a HUGE success for our company and our customers!

The powerful combination of family and employee ownership has significantly contributed to 91ÌÒɫ’s enviable growth – 27 consecutive record years with an average growth of about 17% per year. All of this without any external investment. Our growth has been 100% driven by more and more customers buying our products, and our desire to reinvest everything back into the company.

Being family owned as well as private has allowed us to play the long game.

We’re not focused on the next quarter or cash extraction, but instead on our customers. At Ross, we have countless examples of times when our people have gone above and beyond the call of duty to help our customers, and our support team is consistently ranked as one of the best in the business. This isn’t by accident – we’ve carefully built a company that makes this happen because it’s part of our DNA.

91ÌÒÉ« isn’t for sale. We get offers all the time, but that’s just not something that interests us. When you organize a company to grow instead of to sell, you have more strategic options. For example, you can supply what the industry needs instead of sticking to a single strategy dictated by investors. 

We know that broadcast is a conservative industry overall. Many customers continue to plan for SDI and HD investments. We’re there for them. At the same time, there are also customers who are looking to us to be at the leading edge of UHD, HDR, and IP. We’re there as well. We believe it’s important to serve all our customers and strategically smart not to bet on the rate of change of the expected transitions.

Time after time, I hear customers calling for a different kind of relationship with industry vendors based on longer-term partnership, and I believe that the long-term stability of Ross is well suited for this kind of relationship. The more often I hear these calls, the more convinced I become that the Ross approach – employ great people, make great products and deliver incredible service – is the right formula for sustainable success.